good morning! i have awoken in berlin, after a sound sleep, and have lingered an astonishing hour over breakfast. this is one of the pleasures of travelling, the unexpected pockets of time. as usual, i have stockpiled some new yorkers for travelling (the magazine, not the dynamic people) and wanted to draw your attention to an article about novelists by milan kundera. this is a great piece of writing about the relationship of a writer to her work. it is in the october 9 edition, if you can find it take a look. here is a sentence that gave me pause: “This is the novelist’s curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania.” and here is a paragraph that made me laugh out loud in the hotel cafe:
I was nineteen when, in my home town, a young academic gave a public lecture; it was during the first months of the Communist revolution, and, bowing to the spirit of the time, he talked about the social responsibility of art. After the conference, there was a discussion; what I remember is the poet Josef Kainar (a man of Blatny´s generation, also long dead now), who, in response to the scholar´s talk, told this anecdote: A little boy takes his blind grandmother for a walk. They are strolling down a street, and from time to time the little boy says, “Grandma, watch out – a root!” Thinking she is on a forest trail, the old woman keeps jumping. Passersby scold the little boy: “Son, you´re treating your grandmother so badly!” And the boy says, “She´s my grandma! I´ll treat her anyway I want!” And Kainar finishes, “That´s me, that´s how I am about my poetry.”
-Milan Kundera in the New Yorker, Oct 9 2006